Steve Barclay

When I was in the Cabinet we were also responding to a global pandemic and to the energy inflation as a result of Ukraine. What I am highlighting is that we have an Armed Forces Bill under the hon. Gentleman’s Government in which the Minister is saying that reservists are critical. I am simply pointing to their record and their future plans. I am conscious of time, so I will move on to housing, which is covered in clause 3. Colleagues will know that just last April The Guardian reported the Prime Minister as telling the Cabinet that he wanted to stop outsourcing decisions to quangos, so it will come as no surprise to colleagues across the House that the Bill sets up yet another quango. In fact, the last Armed Forces Bill took a year to pass, so this quango will not be in place until more than halfway through the Parliament, on an issue which Ministers themselves could be making decisions on. The Prime Minister is telling his Cabinet one thing, and the Bill is doing the exact opposite. More importantly, the hon. Member for Lewes (James MacCleary) spoke about how Ministers will have oversight of the new body in terms of the targets. I am afraid I have some news for him: I struggle to find any targets in the Bill. I asked the House of Commons Library what the targets were for this Parliament on housing, and the answer came back that there were none. There are no targets, and yet housing is apparently a huge priority. One could perhaps take comfort at least from whom the Government have put in charge of the housing improvements, as they have appointed a new permanent secretary, but the cross-party Public Accounts Committee published a report just last week—I have not had to go through the archives—in which its Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), says: “I have served on the Public Accounts Committee for twelve years. In all that time a 98% failure rate in a public sector initiative amounts to the most catastrophic fiasco that I have ever seen on the Committee”. The report itself says: “The Department designed the schemes in a way that exposes it to both poor quality work and fraud…There was virtually no attention from senior officials and the Department did not know whether the scheme as a whole was or was not working for at least two years”. It therefore seems a surprise that just three months ago, the Defence Ministers appointed the permanent secretary of that Department to be the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defence, in charge of its flagship programmes, including a housing programme. I ask the Minister, had he read the National Audit Office report when the permanent secretary was appointed? I have a specific question for the Minister regarding clauses 28 and 29. Can he confirm whether any review has been conducted of Army discipline since the general election? If so, was it published, and if it was not, why not and will it be published before Committee stage? In his summing up, can the Minister explain how a Bill that speaks so much about the importance of the military covenant is consistent with removing protections from our Northern Ireland veterans? On the issue of veterans, the Minister announced Operation Valour last May. The Department took six months before it put out a job advert, and it has still not appointed or announced anyone in that post. Can the Minister advise the House why it has taken nine months to appoint someone and when that appointment will be made? Finally, where are the incentives in the Bill? Where are the incentives for employers to recruit reservists —where are the tax incentives and the join-up across Departments?